All tours shot in 3D and will be updated to Street View VR Ready when the new program is released in 2018. This enhancement is exclusive to tours shot with a 3D camera!

Google Street View + Matterport

Google Street View is an amazing way to boost your visibility on search — Matterport 3D is the BEST way to let visitors explore your location on your website. Together, it’s a perfect bundle! Learn More.

The 14 Second ‘Teaser’ Video created by the Matterport Pro-2 Camera is a great addition to your Google Local Listing Imagery.

Frequently Asked Questions

Google Street View for Businesses (Today) is a collection of 360 “Photospheres” that contain geo coordinates and connections to allow viewers to navigate between images in a ‘walk through’ manner.

How is a Google Street View Tour Created?

A photographer shoots a collection of panoramic images and uses a 3rd party service to position them on Google Maps, add connections and publish them to Google.

What Equipment is Used to Created a Google Street View Tour?

There is a large range of cameras that can produce 360 Photospheres. The Ricoh Theta is an inexpensive consumer camera that many low priced Google Street View photographers use. Hallmarks include low resolution, lack of depth of field and substandard image quality.

We use the Matterport Pro-2 Camera. This amazing camera provides DSLR quality images (100 megapixel!), generates a standalone 3D tour for our clients’ websites — and is the first and only camera on the market to be certified for the Google Street View VR Ready program.

What is Google Street View VR Ready?

In May 2017, Google announced that they will be adding true 3D tours to Google Street View under the name ‘Street View VR Ready’.

The hallmarks of 3D tours are that all panoramas are placed within a 3D model and are accurately positioned. The 3D model allows for enhanced transitions between each image as well as an understanding of where boundaries like doors exist. This provides a more realistic tour experience and opens up possibilities to new features such as a dollhouse or floorplan view that is demonstrated in the Matterport 3D Tour that all of our customers experience.

In a nutshell, Google is bringing the Matterport experience to Street View. It was announced in May 2017 and we’re anxiously awaiting more information!

The entry point to a Google Street View Tour is from the ‘See Photos’ link on your businesses listing. You can also enter your tour by dropping the ‘pegman’ on your building in Google Maps. In some instances, your tour may be linked to the actual street to where someone playing around with Google Street View can navigate into your business.

You can also choose to embed your GSV tour on your website. Our clients receive BOTH a Google Street View and Matterport Tour. We believe that Matterport Spaces are much easier to navigate, load faster, and are an overall better product. Therefore, we recommend using the Matteport Tour for your website.

Are there statistics available so that I can track how often my tour is used?

Yes, but surprisingly for Google, the statistics are completely falsified. Google will add a ‘view’ every time your business is loaded on maps and the image gallery appears. Basically, the stats are based on the number of times a thumbnail image is ‘requested’. What’s even sillier is that the thumbnail doesn’t even have to appear on a user’s screen – let alone be clicked. Don’t trust Google’s statistics.

How do I navigate my Google Street View Tour?

Google Street View has arrow-based navigation on mobile, and ‘X’ marks the spot navigation on desktop. The X marks the spot navigation, aka pancake navigation, is truly difficult to use and we recommend using your keyboard to navigate your tour on desktop. Your Matterport tour will not have these issues as it uses a 3D environment to allow smooth navigation between imagery.

Connection Problems (Walking through Walls)

Despite submitting a carefully positioned and strategically connected tour to Google, the ‘pancake navigation’ system will allow viewers to walk directly through walls. This is a limitation caused by Google’s platform. This does not happen with Matterport as Matterport’s 3D environment uses walls as barriers and obeys logical navigation.

Can I pick where the tour should begin?

Not really.

Previously, Google Trusted Photographers were able to set the starting point for tours. Google has taken this ability away from us and instead is using ‘Computer AI’ to automatically select this. This is obviously either a complete lie or their ‘AI’ is not intelligent at all as more often than not, the starting point for tours makes absolutely no sense.

Because of this, we use known hacks to limit the # of possible starting points by removing your business’s name from all panoramas except those that would be logical starting points.

Google used to allow Google Trusted Photographers to set the default thumbnails and their position on Google Street View. They took this away and now show the ‘North’ facing view for a random thumbnail. Often this means showing a wall.

How do people find my tour?

It can be hard for people to find your tour. For years, Google would add a highly visible ‘See Inside’ thumbnail to a business’s listing when they had a Google Street View Business View tour. This entry point had INCREDIBLE value and was the #1 angle that Google Trusted Photographers used to market their services.

Now, tours are mixed in with the photo gallery for a business. As a community of photographers, we are hounding Google about this, but Google simply says that it’s not coming back.

One way to get around this is to use your Google Business (G+) page and post a new post every week containing the starting point for your tour. This information will display first on your infograph for a limited time.

Why should I get a Google Street View Tour?

With all of these issues with Google’s platform, you may think twice about getting a GSV Tour. While we do absolutely everything we can to create the best Google Street View tours that the platform currently allows — there are some issues with the platform currently.

We believe in being very honest about Google Street View and setting realistic expectations. In fact, Google asks us to be transparent and accountable:

So with that being said:

The former ‘Business View’ program offered tremendous value to anyone who participated as it used to be VERY visible. A decision at Google was made to end the ‘Business View’ program and migrate all images to Google Maps and many features were removed. Google’s ‘new’ Street View system is still in development and they have not been entirely transparent or accountable to their Google Trusted Photographers concerning the future. This makes it difficult for service providers to be able to make promises to clients and often leads to awkward explanations of the platform.

It is our HOPE that Google will address all of these issues and that any tours purchased from us and other vendors will increase in value over time as new features are rolled out. We love what we were able to provide for clients and we’d like to be able to continue to deliver the same level of services in the future.

This is why we provide a Matterport Pro-2 with every Google Street View Tour.

Essentially, when you order a Google Street View tour from Metroplex360.com, we are selling you a Matterport Pro-2 tour and providing the Google Street View tour for free. We believe that by doing this, we are delivering exceptional value to our customers.

And who knows … perhaps Google will reintroduce the features that once made this a VERY strong platform.